It is interesting that Reddit is said to support two of the only subreddits that have been removed by the Reddit administration.

I think it is very difficult for people who aren't familiar with Reddit to understand the difference between the policies of subreddits and the policies of the site as a whole. This is made even more difficult by the concept of default subs which seems to be almost an endorsement of those subs' mod's behavior by the administration of Reddit. The actions of the default subreddits certainly end up speaking for the site, weather they are meant to or not.

Indeed. The difficulty in discussing Reddit is that Reddit can mean any number of very distinct things. It can refer to

The website mechanism on which the community is built

The company that runs the website

The moderators of the default subreddits

The aggregate community as a whole

The default subreddit community

Any of the non-default subreddit communities

Because of this the actions of one group are often confused to be representative of all the groups, despite this not being the case. However the diversity of (aggregate) reddit and the complex relationships between all these objects called "reddit" doesn't fit into a simple narrative and is difficult to convey to readers unfamiliar with the site. (Or some redditors, for that matter.)

No. Impeding communication is not equivalent to impeding freedom of speech. You are still free to say whatever you want elsewhere, so your freedom of speech has not been interfered with.

Edit: I think the problem here is that we need a different term to talk about private entities supporting... let's call it "open speech." Freedom of speech has historically been used to refer to the right to free speech guaranteed by the first amendment, which is not related whatsoever to the idea of a private entity disallowing certain types of speech in their own private domain.

I've been thinking about it, and I think there are some interesting points to discuss regarding a private entity's claim to support "open speech" - or the open discussion of any topic - while disallowing certain types. I think this is the idea we're talking about here, but the problem is that the term "freedom of speech" is overloaded to have both the first amendment meaning and the open speech meaning.

Privately owned venues absolutely are a concern for free speech. Read up on rulings about free speech in shopping malls. The public sphere refers to anywhere the general public gathers, regardless of who owns the real estate.

Edit: Did some minor googling, as far as I can tell the right to free speech in malls is protected by California and New Jersey constitutions only. The Supreme Court didn't rule on it, they only ruled that states may give rights not guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution as long as they don't interfere with any rights given by the U.S. Constitution. And even in CA and NJ, the speech is still subject to any "reasonable restrictions" the mall wants to put on it.

Specifically, "the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center." A particular state constitution, however, may decide to broaden that right if they so choose.

Other states have specifically condemned California's decision to force malls to accept free speech: "In refusing to follow Pruneyard, the state supreme courts of New York and Wisconsin both attacked it as an unprincipled and whimsical decision."

So I'd be surprised if a court ruled that reddit constitutes an area where free speech must be allowed.

"Free speech" does not refer only to legally-protected free speech. There is plenty of speech that is not legally protected, and if it is impeded, that is still a restriction of free speech, it's just a legal restriction.

I think no one is saying that what Reddit did or what the mods are doing is or should be illegal. But there is more to free speech than what is legally protected.

I get your point but I have to disagree with it. Why? I want to make it clear by using an example on a bigger scale:

If the government prevented you from using the Internet all-together, by your reasoning they would only imped your ability to communicate on the Internet and not your freedom of speech because you could still talk to your neighbors, make phone calls, etc.

Thus, in a medium such as the Internet (or more correctly in this context world wide web) and such a big site as reddit, it could indeed be argued that this hindrance in communication was hindrance in freedom of speech.

As I understand it this wouldn't be a violation of the first amendment freedom of speech. Perhaps of freedom of assembly, but that seems like a grey area.

Freedom of speech is the freedom of what you say, not where you say it. As an example, you still can't scream and shout and cause a ruckus in a courtroom--obviously they're at the very least going to throw you out (if not arrest you for being in contempt of court).

That is freedom of assembly extended into virtual spaces. There is most certainly a conflation between freedom of speech, ie the right not to be persecuted or prosecuted based on what you say. And the freedom to distribute and promote that speech wherever you see fit.

It is probably about time that we give it some more consideration. Do speech and assembly simply extend to the internet? Or is there more than that, 'open speech,' etc.

The problem with talking about speech and assembly on "the internet" as a whole is it confuses the issue.

I liken "the internet" to "in public," where free speech is protected. But the issue here isn't about putting your views on the internet, it's about putting them specifically on a person or company's private servers. In this case, particular websites are much like businesses - they're "in public" (on the internet). but they themselves are not part of the protected public space.

You are welcome to get your own server, put your views on it, and broadcast it on the internet. And you are welcome to have other people congregate on your server. But you don't have the right to congregate on someone else's server (in someone else's private business). They control that. And if they kick you off their server because they don't like what you say, that doesn't abridge your freedom of speech, because you can still go elsewhere to congregate/say what you want.

Yes, you can distribute and promote your speech "wherever you see fit" - but the owner of a private server also has the freedom to kick you out of their private server and not allow you to distribute and promote your speech there.

Chen is anything but a good journalist. Gawker is a sensationalist rag. Good journalists are people like Hersh and Woodward. If you think profiting on link-bait and rumor are the marks of good journalism then you have low standards.

I'd prefer to take the Chen article at face value rather than writing it off because it is Chen and Gawker. The fact is that VA is newsworthy and once you step outside the reddit bubble, his conduct is of interest and concern to a broader world out there.

I'm not seeing why VA is immune from investigative journalism or from the rather obvious consequences of his online behaviour. He trolled and he trolled hard which to most people is potentially risky behaviour.

It's plain to see how Chen twisted things, and if you know anything about VA prior to this, you'd know 90% of what he posts is simply for shock (popular shock examples: lemonparty, goatse.x...) It's not like he has a monopoly on it, or cares about it, but Chen's article directly made him lose his job, and it's not going to be fun having his name and trying to get a job anytime soon.

I disagree that it's a good journalist doing their job. While VA is pretty disgusting, unless he's actually broken any laws, he shouldn't have had his life ruined. That's what that Gawker article did. It ruined a mans entire life and most likely got him fired etc.

If you do something illegal then you absolutely deserve the consequences. But you can't go around expecting the entire world to conform to your standards of morality.

This is like the Westboro Baptist Church "demonstrations". Do I think what they do is disgusting? Yes. Would I enjoy seeing their lives ruined? Absolutely. Would I do the ruining? No, I would not. Because I understand that they have the right to do what they do, and it's not up to me to prevent it.

I'm pretty sure he did that to himself. If he were really worried about being disassociated with the filth he posted online then he should have done a much better job of guarding his identity. When you have a fan club, logo, and make real world appearances under the name of your online persona, your desire for anonymity is questionable.

Basically, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. People could know his identity, but only the people he wanted to know it. And the rest of us, including Chen, are supposed to respect that policy. That's not how the world works.

No, it's more like "If you've done something wrong, shut the fuck up about it." If he had kept his online persona online instead of trying to bask in his e-fame, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. There are millions of creeps on the planet, but most of them don't build some sort of personal brand out of their creepiness.

For me it sounds like: if you want to become famous media persona, your right to privacy is limited.

From journalistic perspective there is huge difference between privacy of ordinary private person and person who promoting himself to public (even anonymously). If dog bites a man, good journalist reports the news but respects the man's privacy. But if someone becomes well known to wider public and is promoting himself, that person and his identity become interesting news that can be reported. In this case, if it's true that VA was making public appearances, it should not have anything to do with privacy rules of Reddit anymore.

I have not been following this, so I don't have strong opinion to either side. It's just looks like it's not clear cut issue.

Well, what makes you think that violentacrez wanted to become a famous media persona? The fact that he casually went to reddit-meetups and was on pretty okay terms with the old admins?

And frankly, I'm not going to respond to your second paragraph there, because you seem to be trying to imply that gawker even slightly resembles a real journalistic institution. I've got a family member that's a journalist for a pretty big group... and no. I could not even remotely consider them to be in the same career branch. Adrien Chen's article was not journalism; it was a witch hunt designed specifically to destroy violentacrez's life and it's filled with outright bullshit.

You don't know that. And then his boss firing him is what got him fired. His boss not approving of his behaviour is what got him fired. VA being doxxed?

Here is the relevant thread of him getting fired. Take it as you will.

There is no inaliable right to take pictures up young ladies skirts without their knowledge. This isn't a free speech issue.

The issue is that VA never did these acts. He was brought on to creepshots as a moderator only. He contributed very little (no?) content to the community and was active in removing illegal or especially unsavoury pictures. He has been an integral part of many reddit communities creation and expansion, creepshots was not one of them.

If this is a privacy and anonymity issue then why were the girls not afforded privacy?

They deserve just as much privacy as anyone else, including VA. Just because an individual invaded someone elses privacy does not mean we have the right to invade theirs. Instead we should stop them from invading peoples privacy in the future and take any appropriate legal actions if neccesary. If the voyeurs haven't done anything illegal or technically wrong then we should look at the laws and rules and judge as a society whether they are acceptable. To reveal his information is trying to fix a wrong with another wrong and just makes the situation worse, as seen by the whole situation currently going on.

These womens bodies and their right to be photographed don't belong to society and by wearing a skirt they have not forfeited them.

Although I agree with you, many of your rights are forfeited upon entering the public domain. I agree that upskirt pictures should not be allowed but where do we draw the line? Are sexualized pictures that are not upskirt ok? What if a woman is wearing short shorts and she is incidentally in the picture? What about non sexualized but non consenting? We can't draw subjective lines because that won't work when these issues come up. The rules need to be black and white so they can be enforced accurately but where exactly is the line?

Sexualization of a given picture is all individual perspective and context. I personally would not find a little girl in a bikini sexy while some others might. Should we therefore ban individuals from posting photos from the beach where there are little girls about because someone might become aroused? Each individual has different perspectives so, again, we can't have subjective rules on whether something is ok or not. If you ban pictures with panties present you have to ban all of them. If you ban pictures where the individual is unaware you have to ban any picture with background crowds. It just gets very complicated to set out rules that can be applied effectively.

I wouldn't wish this on VA but I am not sad that it happened. I am quite glad. What he did was clearly wrong.

What he did was not illegal, as far as I am aware at least. It was wrong from your perspective, and many others, but to have someones life significantly affected in this negative fashion because others think it is wrong is not the proper course of action. We need to discuss the rules, we need to discuss the laws, but we shouldn't take it into our own hands to dispense justice where we see fit.

As a final note what do you think of the emergence of /r/cshots. A subreddit nearly identical to the ones shut down that has immediately popped up. If this subreddit continues to exist then all of this damage done to VA's personal life was for naught. It is possible that the only thing that may have come of this is that more people will be aware of these types of subreddits, increasing the number of voyeurs posting.

TL;DR Two wrongs don't make a right. We are talking about the wrong issues. Laws and forum rules should be discussed to prevent future wrongdoing.

The issue is that VA never did these acts. He was brought on to creepshots as a moderator only. He contributed very little (no?) content to the community and was active in removing illegal or especially unsavoury pictures. He has been an integral part of many reddit communities creation and expansion, creepshots was not one of them.

And even less of a right to provide a platform for distributing them.

They deserve just as much privacy as anyone else, including VA. Just because an individual invaded someone elses privacy does not mean we have the right to invade theirs. Instead we should stop them from invading peoples privacy in the future and take any appropriate legal actions if neccesary. If the voyeurs haven't done anything illegal or technically wrong then we should look at the laws and rules and judge as a society whether they are acceptable.

This entire paragraph exemplifies the problem with the internet age. It's simple, either the internet is self policing, as it, rather crudely, has been here or it gets heaps of regulation and policing. Which I am against. There is no body to deal with stuff that happens on the internet which has a jurisdiction as wide as cyberspace is. I don't want some fucking cyber police to watch over everything I do. I don't want a raft of new laws which make almost everything a whole bunch of new stuff illegal because some people are bad people. At the same time I don't want bad people to run amok.

To reveal his information is trying to fix a wrong with another wrong and just makes the situation worse, as seen by the whole situation currently going on.

Correct. But the internet happens quickly and the only place I have ever seen due process is wikipedia.

Sexualization of a given picture is all individual perspective and context. I personally would not find a little girl in a bikini sexy while some others might. Should we therefore ban individuals from posting photos from the beach where there are little girls about because someone might become aroused? Each individual has different perspectives so, again, we can't have subjective rules on whether something is ok or not. If you ban pictures with panties present you have to ban all of them. If you ban pictures where the individual is unaware you have to ban any picture with background crowds. It just gets very complicated to set out rules that can be applied effectively.

No, we shouldn't but we sure as hell shouldn't allow fuckers to gather together to masturbate to their shared pic collection. Allowing that type of community to exist encourages that kind of behaviour.

What he did was not illegal, as far as I am aware at least. It was wrong from your perspective, and many others, but to have someones life significantly affected in this negative fashion because others think it is wrong is not the proper course of action. We need to discuss the rules, we need to discuss the laws, but we shouldn't take it into our own hands to dispense justice where we see fit.

What gawker did wasn't against the law either but suddenly reddit mods should dispense justice? I think that one must come to terms with the idea that you cannot have it both ways. You said earlier that two wrongs don't make a right. I don't like this tit for tat either but this is a fight between two groups of people: those who think females have a right to not have this kind of shit happen to them and will try to make that happen and those who want to do this to women. There is no compromise because the positions are diametrically opposed, there can be no agreed upon rules.

I know that if I saw one of my female friends, my lover, my mother or my sister on one of these things I would be filled with rage. To think that someone would not take away their humanity and not ask for their consent like that. And that's why I am angry that someone would do this to any woman. It's objectifying and dehumanising. Having been raped in my own life I know what that feels like and I think that if there is an attitude of permissiveness because of the idea that privacy will be eroded then it breeds the idea that it is not just permitted begrudginly but quietly accepted. To me there is no difference in the outcome. Letting this kind of behaviour go because there is no way to deal with it yet is only going to cause greater problems down the track.

On top of that retroactive punishment is a sticky situation which brings about all kinds of problems.

As a final note what do you think of the emergence of /r/cshots. A subreddit nearly identical to the ones shut down that has immediately popped up. If this subreddit continues to exist then all of this damage done to VA's personal life was for naught. It is possible that the only thing that may have come of this is that more people will be aware of these types of subreddits, increasing the number of voyeurs posting.

And yet reddit is very easy to "police". Admin policy should be to delete subreddits which violate other people's (personal) rights. I don't like homophobia, racism, sexism etc but as long as no one's individual rights are being violated then really it's just thought crime if you take action against it, isn't it? As soon as you tie a real person to it that's where you actually have someones rights violated. The women whose photos were posted in creepshots had their rights violated.

cshots should be shut down. Simple.

If you have read this I would like to thank you because it actually took quite a while to type out.

tl; dr

VA was involved in distribution of the pics, that's arguably worse as he's facilitating and enabling these guys.

Internet regulation will be bad if we make it into laws because it will ultimately lead to the erosion of privacy for all rather than the few.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes all you have are wrongs.

If they are gathering to masturbate it's sexualisation.

What Gawker did wasn't against the law either. This isn't about free speech, it's about these girls and women's right's being impinged upon. Hate speech sucks but it is a cost of living in a free society, pervy photos are not.

We cannot punish people retroactively because that is a sticky, costly exercise and a waste of time.

Subreddits would be easy to police. I could come up with a workable system.

The internet (and reddit) are self-policing. And SRS and Chen just fucked over the most diligent policeman that reddit had. It's going to be a lot easier in the future to find subreddits with child porn and illegal pictures than it was when VA was around.

I know that if I saw one of my female friends, my lover, my mother or my sister on one of these things I would be filled with rage. To think that someone would not take away their humanity and not ask for their consent like that

At this point, I realized that you are incredibly delusional, and stopped reading. You do understand that you sound like those tribal people who believed that a photograph would steal your soul, right?

"VA was involved in distribution of the pics, that's arguably worse as he's facilitating and enabling these guys."

Ridiculous and you glossed over the important thing, he didn't contribute and didn't create it and was brought on to mitigate the badness of the subreddit, which is/was in accordance with reddit rules. Surely it is in fact meritorious of him to wade into that shit subreddit and do some good at removing pictures that break reddit policy, as opposed to standing by like everyone else and letting it be.

There is a difference between up skirt shots and the vast majority of what gets posted on creepshots. If you out in public where any random person can see your ass in yoga pants, YOU HAVE NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY. This is the same reason that TMZ can take paparazzi shots of celebrities. Furthermore, no one on those subreddits was actually posting personal information about the people they took the photos of. Stop conflating something clearly okay by reddit rules and something clearly not okay by the same rules. This is not an issue of free speech. There is no such thing as free speech on the internet.

You don't think anybody should face any consequences for their actions as long as their actions are legal? So if I find a way to skirt the law and do horrible things that are yet somehow not illegal, I'd be above reproach? I shouldn't have any consequences as long as I don't break a law?

Okay so how do you justify the Gawker ban? They didn't do anything illegal.

People do horrible things that are technically legal all the time. Should they face consequences? Maybe or maybe not. It really depends what they did and who you ask. We have to rely on laws for that. Otherwise who is to decide the consequences? Adrian Chen? We have laws and if you break them, you're judged by an impartial jury. Chen and those reacting to AV's repulsive content are obviously not impartial.

Also, Gawker is banned for violating Reddit's rules of posting personal information. The idea is that if Gawker isn't banned for this, then others could post dox to a blog and link it on Reddit as a workaround of the site's rules. As someone else pointed out, imagine someone doing this same thing except instead of outing VA, they post the dox of /r/trees mods. Allowing Gawker to continue posting here would set a bad precedent.

It violates the reddit ToS to reveal another user's identity. Pretty cut and dry. The article has that part wrong, it has always been about that. It doesn't help that Chen has a history of stirring up trouble just to do it.

Just because something is legal does not mean you should let people get away with it. If given the opportunity to stay within legal boundaries and completely ruin the lives of Westboro Babtist Church? Hell yeah I would do it.
The right to free speech does not imply the right to not face consequences for being a dick.

Yeah, that must be it. I mean how can a huge internet site that rabidly defends an individual's rights when that same individual has absolutely zero respect for anyone else's qualify as news? It's just pandering to an audience. Or something...

From most of the talk you see about it, you'd assume that Reddit was nearly unified in banding together behind VA. Maybe it's just the subs I frequent, but I don't know that I've seen anyone defending him. The whole "Reddit hypocrisy" argument is starting to look like a straw man to me.

What I have seen argued (and have argued myself as well) is that there are dangers inherent in publishing the personal information of pseudonymous individuals on the net, and that a general principle against open "doxxing" makes a great deal of sense. That's so for a number of reasons.

One is simply that a lot of innocent people use Reddit to discuss things that they're not at liberty to discuss in their region. Reddit has, for example, a large atheist population, including many atheists who would be persecuted in their home country if what they said on Reddit were publicly connected to their real identity.

Another is that, on a site populated by strangers with varying degrees of moral fiber, it's all too easy to maliciously use a person's identity against them. Moderator TheCid recently gave an example in which an /r/tf2 user gathered personal information about a mod and used it to make false accusations to the police—all over a beef in a gaming sub.

A third is that publishing a person's specifics in a major publication like Gawker casts a wide net. Sure, you snare the doxxed individual in the trap of public revulsion, but you might also catch innocent bystanders that the public considers guilty by association. You're also making the same information equally available to law-abiding citizens and would-be vigilantes alike. It's irresponsible journalism of the sort that sometimes sparks witch-hunts.

That's a misrepresentation of the issue. The point being made is that sites like Gawker are trying to falsely frame this about 'free speech' when the reality is it's about privacy, and the choices of a private company
(reddit)

Reddit mods are also falsely trying to frame this about free speech when the reality is that

Paraphrased: "In the name of freedom of speech, we will enact censorship."
Don't act like this is some noble thing you're doing, because it quite blatantly isn't.
You do understand that the whole bloody point of freedom of speech is that it allows for speech that you don't like, right? Why do you think Westboro Baptist Church is allowed to piss off the rest of the world? Because of freedom of speech - even disliked speech.
No, this isn't about freedom of speech at all - if it was, you'd be saying, "You know what? That Gawker article was all sorts of fucked up. But we value freedom of speech around here, so even though we don't like it, we're going to have to allow it."
Even if you banned that one article (which doesn't really make sense, because it's so fully disseminated in Reddit already), it doesn't at all follow that you should ban the entire online network. That's overly punitive, and punishes a large group of completely unrelated individuals (io9, anyone? I'm sure they had nothing whatsoever to do with this, and had no idea about it until everyone else did.) When the police randomly punish a lot of individuals in the general vicinity of a crime (but those individuals themselves not being criminals), we get up in arms about it - but this action of your is substantively analogous to that example.
It just makes us look like our values are only used when it suits us - and hence, that we do not actually value them at all.

Isn't the reason that the article in particular is banned because Reddit has a strict policy against doxxing? VA's privacy and his right to remain anonymous are the issue at hand. We can argue about whether or not VA actively infringed on other's privacy and whether or not that precludes him from the same rights but don't try to frame this as his free speech rights vs Adrian Chen's. They both have the right, on reddit, to say what they want to the point where it divulges users (this extends to non-users as well) private information.

You know there's a difference between reddit mods and reddit admins, right?

The admins haven't blocked gawker- the moderators of certain private subreddits have done so, for their own various personal reasons possibly related or unrelated to the situation. Don't like it? Well, then, you're free to go elsewhere- including elsewhere on Reddit itself.

/r/circlejerk was comprised of literally noting but Gawker links last time I checked.

/r/kotaku, /r/gizmodo and /r/gawker are all open subreddits. There are plenty of options left to people who want to post Gawker material- including just starting their own brand new subreddit if every single one of the 9,900 active subreddits that don't have rules against Gawker are somehow unacceptable to them.

That's business for you. IMO it was a smart move, Gawker's had a long history of taking pot shots at Reddit to stir up our infamous nerd rage and garner page views. If they didn't ban them, Gawker'd keep doing it, every other news media would join in and pretty soon Reddit's a complete wasteland because nobody wants to be associated with them.

It's only slowing the tide, though smart in the short-term. This is opposed to say 4chan, who takes genuine mirth in their psychopathic reputation because everyone's too scared to really call any attention to them. Any journalist that starts stirring the pot will be banned from every pizza joint in a 45-mile radius.

And yet, that excuse doesn't fly. When anyone talks about how it'd be smart to ban /r/beatingwomen or /r/niggers, the answer is always "WE HAVE TO PRESERVE FREE SPEECH!" So yeah. It's "WE HAVE TO PRESERVE FREE SPEECH ... unless it's something that attacks us personally."

You can't "agree" or "disagree" with someone else's private information. If this reporter had published pieces arguing that redditors shouldn't be anonymous, there would have been no reprisal. But he wasn't interested in opinions, controversial or otherwise - he just wanted to reveal someone else's information for his own gain. Nefarious acts which use speech, such as con artistry and blackmail, have never been protected by free speech rights.

To me, it's not about the private information. It's not the act of revealing a name that is troubling, but the intent and subsequent results. The revelation was the act, it was the tool, but the intent was to destroy a mans life, and that is what many on reddit don't like.

You won't find many people saying they want to protect VA cause he's a great guy or that he even deserves it, or that we need and want jailbait. You'll find them being afraid of the implications. Yeah, this time it's VA who's life is being destroyed, and maybe he is a scumbag who deserves it. But what happens when someone decides they hate hippies who smoke weed, and they need to be destroyed, so the mods of /r/ents get outed next. What if they go through pun threads, and find people who made a holocaust joke, and inform their boss.

I just don't think people want the morality police forcing all to conform to societies morals, with the threat of life destruction as the price, when no one has broken any laws.

Nah, first they came for the teenage girls with Facebook photos; that's the problem. Their "privacy" was violated by the "paedophilic scumbags" who then turned around and tried to benefit from the anonymity they denied to others (and never mind that Reddit doesn't allow personal information in text form - taking a photo out of its context for people to leer over is a pretty gross violation of privacy).

I'm a big fan of online anonymity, but Reddit's been trying to have its cake and eat it too for long enough that that cognitive dissonance finally revealed itself with disastrous results.

That's fine and all... personally, I don't think people should expect to be anonymous on the internet.

The problem for the linked article writer though is not that the guy was outed -- right or wrong, it's done. The problem was reddit's response. How does blocking access to Gawker accomplish anything? It seems to violate the spirit of reddit just as much as outing somebody does. Most importantly, it won't prevent this same type of thing from happening in the future. It might have actually increased Gawker's profile somewhat. I understand wanting there to be consequences for the act of outing, but maybe we should just stick to the high road, and realize that there are consequences with everything that we do.

The problem was reddit's response. How does blocking access to Gawker accomplish anything?

Chen wrote the article as nerdbait to generate traffic and get ad revenue. It's not the first time he's done something like this, either, and blocking links to Gawker shows that we're not complicit with them attacking reddit users and using the website for monetary benefit.

It reduces Gawkers traffic, which should hopefully discourage their business model. And I mean, let's be blunt, this is just the straw that broke the camels back. Gawker has been bullshit nerd baiting worse than papparazzi bloggers masquerading as journalists for a long time.

By writing investigative journalism, which is his job. Also, why are you bringing blackmail and con artistry into this, it's not relevant at all. If you're referring to VA being blackmailed to Chen, that's just something VA claimed at first-- he later came out and said that he freely admitted who he was in an interview he had agreed to do.

Might want to find a safe place to hide. Because Zombie Walter Cronkite is coming to beat the crap out of you for suggesting that revealing the identity of an anonymous web forum user is "investigative journalism"

Exactly. An analogue is someone who reveals the identity of a CIA agent in enemy territory. This is not free speech, but treason under the law.

In this case, revealing the identity of the poster was an act that could legitimately damage that person's career and family. It's not merely an act of free speech meant to express Gawker's opinions or views.

That said, free speech does not forgive the posting of photos of people without their permission. While we legitimately say that you can't post private information, that should logically be extended to you can't post others private photos. So what was going on in that sub, should have been stopped by the higher ups.

The web site also published names, home addresses, telephone numbers, and other personal information regarding abortion providers—highlighting the names of those who had been wounded and striking out those of who had been killed.

A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision finally shut the site down in 2002 after a prolonged debate

The purpose of "doxing" someone is purely to expose them to personal attack. This isn't an issue of freedom of speech. It's an issue of harassment.

Actually, you're completely missing the point of why the site violated the 1st Amendment.

Having the identity of the abortion doctors, their children's pictures, their addresses, home phone numbers, workplace, etc. is completely legal. It's public information. To compile public information into one webpage is completely legal.

To advocate and insinuate support for the murder and injury of these doctors (via strikethroughs, graying-out of the pictures, blood-dripping gifs) is where they violate the 1st Amendment because now this simple compilation of public information becomes a direct threat to each doctor on the list, which is not protected under the 1st Amendment.

If anything, this is a question of journalistic ethics, not 1st Amendment infractions.

Exactly. An analogue is someone who reveals the identity of a CIA agent in enemy territory. This is not free speech, but treason under the law.

WOAH! This is not even close, man!

The reason that that is illegal is because it directly violates a bunch of laws specifically suited for that situation, most notably being the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement (basically, you signed a contract and forfeited your 1st Amendment rights), and the Espionage Act (very broad wartime/war-related law).

When it comes to a non-wartime situation, you won't even come close to touching those laws.

In response to the headline: "And so do we, making us gigantic hypocrites."

Very few are courageous enough to actually support free speech. It has always been that way. It will always require you to defend speech you hate, and always lead to pinheads watching from the outside to conclude that you actually agree with the hated speech. Defend the right of a Nazi to engage in anti-semitic speech, and you will be painted as a Nazi. The same in any other arena. A real defender of free speech will defend the right of the public to incorrectly call them a Nazi.

We already know those kinds of defenders win any conflict. It's nothing new. The pinheads and weaklings who don't want 'dangerous' speech to be around because they fear what their fellow man will do with such concepts will lose and be humiliated, as they deserve.

Free speech refers to the concept that people should be free to express their opinions. While this right is guaranteed at the government level, it is still argued for and idealized in most aspects of Western culture.

The confusion is that there is a Constitutionally enshrined protection of Free Speech against government censorship, but there is also a greater idea of Free Speech (I prefer to call it Free Expression, to avoid confusion with the legal idea) which can apply to the world at large. Reddit is under no legal obligation to allow these groups to exist, but if they want to adhere to a greater idea of Free Expression, they might. Free Speech is not absolute, however. There are laws against harassment and there are laws against Copyright Infringement, and Creepshots / Jailbait are probably violating both.

I was with you right up to the end. Creepshots and Jailbait were both moderated to avoid violating the law. Good taste was shot to hell, but the law was enforced. As I understand it, Violentacrez turned over pedophiles posting CP to the admins so they could work with the police to prosecute.

There's a difference between free speech and right to be published/advertised, of course, but the idea of reddit is supposed to be that it is user-submitted, and user-moderated primarily, if not exclusively, by votes. The site's moderators, however, and sometimes even the admins, now take it upon themselves to determine more and more what can and cannot be posted, taking that choice away from the users. That is the essential conflict of reddit as of late, in my opinion. The VA case just amplifies it. Is blocking a website a free speech violation? Not in the least. No more than boycotting Rush Limbaugh violates his free speech. But it does beg the question: Is Reddit truly an open site run by users, or is it now being revealed as a site run by special interests who have the power to amplify or silence any speech they wish? Most Redditors feel that they are a part of something community driven. Will they stick around if they feel there are a handful of people, and perhaps corporations, who determine what they can see, what they can share, and what they can say?

I don't think anyone is arguing that legal action should be taken against Gawker or Adrian Chen. However, publishing someone's personal information online for selfish reasons is a dick move, albeit a legal one, and it invites retaliation in kind. Gawker is free to publish whatever they want, but subreddit mods are also free to block them as a retaliatory action. In my opinion, this doesn't have much to do with free speech. If you want to go around yelling racist slurs, you should be (and are) free to do that. However, other people are free to take similarly legal actions in retaliation, such as not allowing you on their property. Nobody in this scenario is interfering with free speech.

Well, reddit has just about only one rule - don't cyberbully users by giving away personal information. And they violated it. What were they expecting? Perhaps there is room for additional rules again, for instance, posting harrassing images of underage women on certain subreddits. But I don't think the admins should get involved simply because something is offensive. They should maybe get involved 1.) When someone is blatantly violating the law (not really their choice anyway) and 2.) When someone is being harassed. That's about it.

What always confused me was the idea that posting pictures of people under the age of consent in a sexual context against their will is just as much if not more so an attack on their priavcy as releasing people names who post such things.

If reddit's moderators and admins were in favour of true freedom of speech no matter what the consequences then they would not censor articles from gawker or elsewhere.

Violentacrez having his details released is just like a nerd version of wikileaks. Reddit doesn't block leaked documents from governments or other people but seemingly the ban whole sites from being linked too if they go after one of their own power users.

Gawker attacked a reddit user with the intention of stirring up drama and increasing traffic to their website, generating a bunch of ad money. Regardless of your opinion of violentacrez, Gawker broke the rules by publishing personal information on a user and trying to use Reddit for monetary gain.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I didn't really follow the drama in-depth), but I believe reddit admins banned linking to any sites in the Gawker network sitewide as a response to Chen's expose on violentacrez.

EDIT: also, what is Reddit if not its community of users? It seems reasonable to me to say "Reddit" in place of "the majority of Reddit's users".

Don't expose personal user information. It's a pretty standard thing at reddit, and since it would just create a runaround where someone would blog it and link to the blog, they had to do something. Otherwise, it's just out whomever for some pageviews

Well, it certainly is fun when a site that owns and operates www.gawker.com/upskirts thinks creepshots is/was terrible because it was made up of pictures (often sexualized) taken without the female subject's consent.

I mean that both sarcastically and truthfully. I don't find any reason for subreddits like creepshots to exist and they're in poor taste. But it's the pot calling the kettle black. Why should a site that operates an equally invasive webpage be exempt from their own moral outrage?

This is a really disappointing distinction, then. The Redditors who think of themselves as grand and noble defenders of free speech need to adjust their views of their group. In the mix are many who want to defend their right to gawk at pictures that make them aroused regardless of whom they hurt; free speech has nothing to do with it.

Absolutely, free speech is all to often used as an excuse for any kind of hurtful behavior. I think reddit as site has a reasonable policy here, allowing people to trust in that their anonymity wont get broken. The limits of where private life end and public life begins in general would be to complicated to enforce.

Basically it is because other people can see you, you know they can see you and it is not unexpected that someone will see you.

This is pretty consistently the dividing line between having and not having an expectation of privacy. It's why paparatzi cannot shoot photos through celebrities windows but they can totally take pictures of them drunk at a bar with their shirts off.

For the same reason you have no expectation of privacy (in a legal sense) on Reddit either. The distaste for doxing has to do with internet culture along with a desire to prevent vigilante justice.

I think you could argue that. And you could equally argue that what Gawker did to expose the people involved with that was fair game. Just as you can argue that what "reddit did" in retaliation was fair game.

My point is it has nothing to do with 'free speech'. No one's 'free speech' is being violated.

What is occurring is Gawker is trying to ride reddit's coat-tails, and reddit is simply shutting off their access to those coat-tails.

I'm troubled that the justification for keeping Jailbait and Creepshots around was that Reddit was honoring their commitment to free speech, then. If Reddit wants to position itself as this open forum, the community is going to have to be grown up enough to take a little criticism.

Publishing someone's name is bad, but posting photos of women who are inadvertently showing underwear is just fine

I'd say they're both unscrupulous actions, but as long as the women's identities aren't being revealed, then yes, I think doxxing is "worse."

Violentacrez might very well have lost his job as a result of his being "outed," and while you may say that it serves him right since he was posting such skeevy material in the first place, as long as he was doing so anonymously then he was not jeopardizing his or his employer's reputation. Presumably, once his info was leaked, he became a liability.

On the other hand, do any of the women who get posted to creepshots even know their images have been posted there? Does having their image posted there tangibly affect their life in any way? You might say "well yes, because places like creepshots validate the hegemonic culture of rape and objectification of women," etc., to which I would respond that this is not tangible but rather intangible harm.

When someone gets doxxed, they might lose their job or have random people harassing their family members over the phone or receive hateful items in the mail. These constitute tangible harm. On the other hand, when someone gets their image posted to a site like creepshots, they are not being tangibly harmed. In other words, there are direct consequences of being doxxed that don't exist when one's image is posted somewhere. You might say "well, feeling like I can't even be in public without the risk of some perv taking my photo and putting it online for neckbeards to jerk off to is a tangible consequence," to which I'd reply: you're kidding yourself if you think this kind of vigilante voyeurism is limited to one subreddit or even to the internet itself. That risk will exist whether or not there's a (known) subreddit dedicated to it.

Therefore, to reiterate, I think doxxing is the worse of the two "crimes" being discussed here.

Was revealing Violentacrez's identity illegal? If it was legal, why all the outrage? He knew what he was doing was controversial. His goal was to be controversial. He wanted to make creepy stuff available to anybody. If he thought his employer would never know, then he was naive. Freedom from consequences of one's actions is not a reasonable expectation.

If protecting his privacy in the short run is the most important thing, then people are losing sight of the long-term consequences. Letting somebody post bikini photos of barely pubescent girls and upskirt photos is not the way to keep a standard of privacy intact. People in Congress who know nothing of Reddit's value will use its protection of Creepshots and Jailbait to justify invading everyone's privacy.

I've been defending Reddit to people this week, saying it's a great forum for discussion, for links to articles about scientific discoveries, for conversation with people who are experts in their fields, for advice from a large range of people with different viewpoints. My non-redditor friends only know about Creepshots and Jailbait.

Because anonymity is the foundation of the internet. Take it away, and the internet becomes a ghost town where everyone is afraid to say anything. This whole thing is bigger than VA or Creepshots: it's a violation of the greatest unspoken internet rule: no doxxing. Doxxing is the internet equivalent of high treason.

Letting somebody post bikini photos of barely pubescent girls and upskirt photos is not the way to keep a standard of privacy intact.

That's a complete non-sequitur. Jailbait and Creepshots have little if anything to do with the doxxing issue, at least in principle. The former are issues of subjective morality and public relations, the latter is an issue of internet "law". Doxxing is a shady, underhanded, and in all likelihood hypocritical way of dealing with issues on the internet, and it was completely unnecessary to reveal VA's identity in order to bring down Creepshots, especially since VA had very little to do with the subreddit anyway. Ironically, the people who actually posted to jailbait and creepshots are still on this very site, because they never became the targets of the mob's ire, only the people who administrated the subreddits did. Pardon the crude analogy, but the clerks in the death camp office were strung up while the people running the showers walked away.

I've been defending Reddit to people this week, saying it's a great forum for discussion, for links to articles about scientific discoveries, for conversation with people who are experts in their fields, for advice from a large range of people with different viewpoints.

It's this way because of the quasi-anonymity the system grants, plus the voting. Depending on which one you take away this place either turns into 4chan or a ghost town/Facebook.

Well, this goes back to the "tangible vs. intangible consequences" thing I mentioned earlier. Now, I'm certainly no authority, and perhaps that point is in itself debatable (in fact, I'm sure it is). But that would be whence the outrage, I believe.

If he thought his employer would never know, then he was naive.

Coupled with the knowledge that it seems he wasn't as super-tight with his "online security" or what have you as he could have been (e.g. freely attending redditor meetups, revealing his actual name/identity to other redditors), I will actually agree with you here that this was probably a bit naive of him to expect.

People in Congress who know nothing of Reddit's value will use its protection of Creepshots and Jailbait to justify invading everyone's privacy.

People in Congress will find ways to "invade everyone's privacy" (presumably via the attempted legislation of SOPA, CISPA, and the like) with or without reddit's help. If you disagree that the doxxing was worse than the original subreddits that sparked said doxxing in this case, fine! For real. I understand where you're coming from. But criticize violentacrez's actions on their own merit (or lack thereof), not because of some vague, ominous connection with federal congresspeople drafting misguided internet legislation.

My non-redditor friends only know about Creepshots and Jailbait.

Fortunately, it sounds like you're there to help clear up their ignorance. If they still believe this about reddit despite your protestations, then they can just come on by and check out the site for themselves. Or not; at the risk of sounding callous, I don't really care what your friends (or any reddit user's friends) think about reddit. Hell, I don't really care what my friends think about reddit.

I do care what people think. Reddit has a lot of value. This kind of forum is a rare thing. People from anywhere in the world can have their ideas taken seriously here. A 14-year-old who has had shitty sex education at school and at home can ask questions and have answers from men, women, old people, young people, anybody! People can talk politics and connect with those who have legitimate differences, and who will have a respectful discussion! The president can answer questions! Not in much detail, but still, wow! Unprecedented. A Jeopardy champ who is a Mormon can make jokes with people who never took Mormons seriously! The cross communication between cultures and generations here is something new and incredibly valuable.

As an old woman, I'm tired of the continued tolerance of bad behavior toward women. I'm tired of the intrusive and inappropriate sexualization of women that was celebrated on Creepshots and Jailbait. Women are thinking people whose ideas and contributions are valuable in ways that have nothing to do with their potential as focuses for masturbation.

This defense of the privacy of an individual male--no matter how he behaved--was disappointing. There are so many young men on this site who are behaving well toward women that it was really disheartening to see Reddit appear to close ranks around this one guy who was carrying forward the traditions that made growing up female fifty years ago so difficult. "We can't disclose the identity of this guy, or mute his free speech!" Fuck that. The Reddit community deserves so much respect for what the forum has achieved that this position is an embarrassment.

There initially was a site-wide ban, then they reversed it, saying "but moderators can ban whatever content they choose". But I get that freedom of the press doesn't really matter much to reddit moderators.

but he WAS friendly with lots of people who run this site. there was an AMA with one of the former admins (jedberg/keysersosa ?) a while ago (way before all of this drama) and he described how when they created subreddits they didn't really know how to handle all the nsfw ones and what to do with them. and violentacrez pretty much stepped in and according to them did a good job of policing all of them.

he explicitly said something like the reddit admins being glad for having him around, just so they wouldn't have to deal with the ickiness of all of it.

i think this is one of the major problems of the site at the moment, some clear mission statement from the people running this site.

"Reddit" does this and "Reddit" does that....goddamnit, we're alll just a bunch of diverse individuals using a website. I'm here all the time and I didn't hear about those banned subs until they were in the news. I didn't hear about this "outing" of the guy behind them until now.

You can find free speech anywhere on reddit; and you can find the consequences. Say something stupid and it will be downvoted, just like what happens in real life. Skinheads can say they hate jews or niggers, but they will be publicly shamed. A commenter can say the same thing; he will be downvoted.

This is exactly why this banning gawker bullshit is so damaging for reddit and I would love to see cooler heads prevail, quickly. I tell people about reddit all the time and how great it is, now they will get the news that not only does reddit host creepy shit like CS, but they then defend the fucked up loser that made it on the flimsy grounds of "free speech" while at the exact same time censoring actual journalism. If there wasa viable alternative I would be out of here faster than you can say Digg 2.0.

I'm surprised that Condé Nast (or whoever the newish owner is- sorry, I can't be bothered looking) hasn't made a public statement about this and undertaken site-wide action regarding the Gawker bannings, as opposed to leaving it up to users. I'm a lawyer, and if I were CN's in-house counsel, I'd be strongly advising them not to restrict Gawker links, as it gives the appearance of mods being in collusion of sorts and Reddit being negligent in preventing such acts. User-driven or not, Reddit/Condé Nast has the same duty of care that all businesses do. If and when this reaches legal discussion, what is happening with the bans right now will be very damaging to Reddit's image and would be favourable in proving joint responsibility and aiding and abetting. This site is big enough that this will be investigated further -if only for the sake of appearances- and I would be surprised if Reddit/Condé Nast walked away unscathed. The fact that there's an article about this in The Guardian is testament to the visibility this will have. Condé Nast will protect its ass and the authorities will need to make an example of this. It will not go uninvestigated or without consequences.

This is exactly why this banning gawker bullshit is so damaging for reddit

This is why I take anything from gawker with a grain of salt. You're confused because gawker is not banned from reddit. Only a few subreddits have done this and if you don't believe me then check out /r/circlejerk

I find it really surprising that I haven't seen my take on this posted anywhere else, so I'll post it here.

To me this is typical of the problems people have when trying to think about problems that involve "tribes". In this case Reddit and Gawker are both tribes. As soon as you have that, all kinds of insane assumptions come into play almost unchallenged. Things like:

All members of a tribe represent that tribe. The tribe acts as one.

Any position or opinion held by a member or subsection of a tribe is held by the whole tribe

When tribes A and B are inconflict:

Any argument in favour of Tribe A is against Tribe B, and vice versa

Any argument/opinion must belong either to Tribe A or Tribe B, or in very sophisticated people, somewhere on a line between the two. But never anywhere else.

One of the tribes is "in the right".

What VA did was wrong. What Chen did was also wrong. "Reddit" cannot be hypocritical, because hypocrisy is internal inconsistency, which any group has anyway, being composed of more than one person.

What was that? He created hundreds of NSFW subreddits; he certainly wasn't attracted to even a quarter of the content. And he did a fantastic job of ensuring that only legal content was posted to all of his subreddits to the very best of his ability.

He never took any pictures off of anyone's Facebook pages; only from 4chan.

I mean; he wasn't a saint. I think comparing him to Gale from Breaking Bad is a fair thing to do; "I might be cooking meth, but people are going to get their hands on meth regardless if I'm the one making it. At least when they get it from me it's safe, and they're getting exactly what they paid for."

And here he is now. Unaffordable legal help, no health insurance, no job, and a hundred death threats an hour.

I agree. Hopefully when VA does his CNN interview, they don't fuck him over and instead give him a chance to discredit Gawker and Chen as the awful shitrags that they are for profiting off of the destruction of his livelihood.

This article is the first I've heard of this controversy, because I get much of my news from Reddit. I'm unsubscribing from every sub that has blocked Gawker, because I feel like this is hypocritical. Of course, that's pretty much just bestof, but still.

I have not seen anyone mentioning the obvious: neither Adrian Chen, nor Gawker in general, really gives two shits about the free speech issues involved. What they want is page views. Millions and millions of 'em. Any story that gets reddit riled up enough to land on the front page will pay out for Gawker quite well. I think the most appropriate response to this sort of trolling is to deny them their reddit traffic with this temporary ban.

The issue I have with the Gawker article, is that it crossed a line. It took silly online arguments between grown up children to a new platform, and introduced real life consequences because "people are offended". The Gawker article was flying with colours and inaccuracies that frankly has me questioning just how much does the media spin the truth to their benefits? I mean for fucks sake, JB was old news and yet both of these articles still want to make strong mentions of it just so they could smear their target a little more. It's the easiest trick in the book - call your opponent a pedophile, wins the debate with a landslide of ignorant votes. A line such as this:

Violentacrez and his fellow moderators worked hard to make sure every girl on jailbait was underage, diligently deleting any photos whose subjects seemed older than 16 or 17.

is simply rage inducing. Taken out of context, paint the man like a monster, but never mention that the mods also do their job to remove anything that is illegal. If it was mentioned the other way around the man would sound like a goddamn hero. That's why I love the media and how it spins.

But my point remains. I'm not defending violentacrez's action. I'm not defending the subreddits. I'm not defending Gawkers position. Everything that's happened up to this point is a knee-jerk reaction to another. And now, reddit as a whole benefit from the drama, but is faced under much scrutiny. Gawker benefit from the glory of the journalism but is now under ban from Reddit denying them traffic. The subreddits benefited from the increased traffic but is now banned. Violentacrez benefited from his trolling fame and had his fun, but is now faced under real life consequences of being fired and shamed.

I don't really so the problem with banning Gawker. Reddit has a rule, no posting of personal information. Gawker broke that rule by allowing one of their writers to publish that article. They get banned. Where is the drama?

On a side note the idea of Adrian Chen being allowed to call himself a journalist for this kind of crap is a travesty of the highest degree. He is an embarrassment to actual journalists everywhere.

Yesterday Gawker. Today The Guardan. Tomorrow what, the Wall Street Journal? Where does it end? Ban links to articles at any media outlet on the planet that talks smack about Reddit? Are the admins of Reddi really such big journalistic pansies that they can't take criticism? Because that doesn't bode well for a forum that claims to be the entire internet's front page.

To be honest, I am dreading it because if they don't put an end to this bullshit and walk it back from what these mods are doing I am thinking reddit will be losing some people. The vast majority of comments and the highest voted ones all are vehemently against this shit.

VA never did anything illegal. He wasn't necessarily attracted to the content of his subs; he was just there to keep them running smoothly. He wasn't the most noble guy, but not a single one of us is truly righteous, after all. He never posted CP. He never posted in creepshots.

Does reddit seriously think he deserves to have his life ruined?

It's insane. I've been on this website for over 3 years now, and I thought I understood the community better. This is just... so incredibly contrary to everything I thought reddit was.